Issue 001: Welcome! Power Platform changes and some bonus recommendations

Hi!

Welcome to my first newsletter 😃.

I'm genuinely excited (and kind of terrified) to send stuff to your mailbox, so I'll do my best to make it worth your while.

I published the link not too long ago, so it's amazing to see people subscribing already.

Feel free to send this to anyone you want, and if you have feedback for me, just reply to the email and I'll try to address it. If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, here's how to subscribe.

Let's start with the newsletter itself.

Timelines and Rules

Since this is the first issue, let's do a quick run on the format and timelines.

This will be sent roughly once a month. I think this is the best timeline so that I can provide you with things to learn or know about, in a decent cadence.

The format will be a combination of things you need to know, like Power Platform changes, automation strategies, concepts, and anything I find that will make your workflows better.

As for the rules, apart from the monthly sending, the main one is privacy. Your email address doesn't go anywhere. It will only be used to send this newsletter, and that's it. You can check the privacy policy for more details.

You can unsubscribe anytime if you feel that this newsletter is not for you, or, if you prefer, you can use the RSS feed and get all issues in your favorite RSS reader.

Let's see what's new in the Power Platform.

What's coming to the Power Platform?

Here are some of the new things coming in Power Automate between April 2026 and September 2026:

• Restore accidentally deleted flows. Due in July 2026. If you've ever deleted a flow and felt your stomach drop, that becomes something you fix yourself instead of opening a support ticket.
• Process license capacity shared across workflows through flow groups. Also due in July 2026.
• A proper Power Automate licensing dashboard in August 2026, so working out what your automations actually cost gets less painful.
• PGP encrypt and decrypt in desktop flows, plus time and cost savings reporting, in case you need the extra security. Both shipped on July 16, 2026.
• Previews queued for desktop flows: current Python versions for scripts, scheduling a desktop flow directly, and seeing a flow as a flowchart.
• Object-centric process mining reached general availability back on June 5, 2026.

Desktop flows clearly took the bulk of this wave. Across the rest of the platform:

• Power Apps is standardizing modern theming for everyone and bringing real-time Dataverse access to offline-first canvas apps.
• Power Pages is leaning on its security agent to give makers and admins something actionable for locking sites down.
• Dataverse is going all in on agents with MCP servers, a Python SDK, and Work IQ wired into Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Governance gets granular Copilot credit consumption with pay-as-you-go caps, connector dependency visibility, and GitHub integration with deploy from Git.

The full release plan has the details if you want to dig in.

Now let's take a look at what's going away.

What's going away (or changing) in the Power Platform?

Microsoft has announced a few changes, and some of them may impact you. I wrote up all the details, but here's the short version.

• The Power Automate mobile apps are going away on August 31, 2026, both iOS and Android. Power Apps iOS replaces some of the features but not all of them. Teams will allow you to see the status of the approvals, so it's another alternative, but nothing will replace it 100%.
• The Excel add-in is going away. Just replace it with the native Automate tab, and you're good to go.
• Personal accounts are already gone. If you were signing in with something like a gmail.com or outlook.com address, that window closed on July 26, 2025, and the flows tied to those accounts were deleted. You need a work or school account now.

Here's the full Microsoft post with all deprecations.

Random Stuff

Here are some things that I found interesting in the last month, in no particular order.

• If you ever used the Claude Share button, your chat logs could be available online. Go to Claude > Settings > Privacy > Shared Chats and remove them. There were a lot of private chats leaked, so protect yourself.
• Want to learn something? Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning.
• "Qantas tests new ultra long-range Airbus in 17,000km direct flight from France to Melbourne". Soon we'll be able to go from Europe to Australia in a direct 19-hour flight 😃.
• "AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books". This news made me sad. Rare books should be preserved. It's not only about their information but also about keeping something historical alive. It's like finding a sarcophagus in Egypt, taking a picture of it, and then destroying it.
• If you need a summer book, try "Dungeon Crawler Carl" (for fun) or "Revenge of the Tipping Point" (to learn something).
• If you need something to listen to, try this jazz album "Honora" by Flea (yes, the guy from Red Hot Chili Peppers). I'm adding the live performance so that you can see him playing the trumpet. If you like, you can also see a performance on the Tiny Desk Concert. The humility of Flea is on full display here, so I won't spoil anything.
• Congrats to Spain on winning the World Cup (not that I'm bitter about them beating Portugal 😃).

See you all in August.

Photo by Jonathan Gong on Unsplash